Trisquel 4.5 "Slaine" released

Our latest version is ready for download. It includes a lot of updates, along with an overhaul of the development process -compilation scripts and build jails- which was largely upgraded to simplify automation. This improvements made it easier to apply changes to the upstream packages, leading to a much more polished result.

Along with many bugfixes, Slaine comes with a new boot manager for the live images, an improved installer which showcases the project highlights, and new programs like the Remmina remote desktop client, the social network client Gwibber or the backup tool Deja-dup.

The web browser received several changes to improve speed -enabling http pipelining and other methods-, privacy -blocking third party cookies by default and moving to Duck Duck Go as default search engine-, and usability -the preinstalled FlashVideoReplacer plugin allows to watch videos from YouTube, Vimeo and many others. This improvements have been backported to 4.0 LTS.

Slaine is based on Ubuntu 10.10, and as always it contains just free software. The main packages include:

Linux-libre 2.6.35

Xorg 7.5

GNOME 2.32

Mozilla based web browser 3.6.15

OpenOffice.org 3.2

One of the exciting improvements for this release is the availability of an experimental Nouveau driver for NVIDIA cards which allows for 3D acceleration using fully free software. It is very promising but still a bit unstable on certain cards, so it ships disabled by default. You can enable it by simply clicking here.

As usually it comes in 32 and 64 bit flavours, and being an STS release it will be supported for a year. Current Trisquel 4.0 LTS users can choose to keep using that release -which will be supported until 2013- or upgrade to 4.5 using the update manager. To make your system prompt for this update, configure the "Software Sources" program to show "Normal releases" instead of only LTS releases. This release will be the Live operating system included in the FSFmembercards from now on -in replacement of Trisquel 4.0-.

You can help the project by downloading the iso images and seeding them via bittorrent. You can also help by buying gifts from our stores, by giving donations, or by becoming an associate member.

In the following days we will also release Trisquel 4.5 mini edition and an incremental update on the LTS branch.